I think my point is/was that there's no divider in nVidia's lineup now. Their entire lineup up to the GTX 1070 can fit in laptop thermal envelopes with no issue, so could easily fit in the iMac, and they crush the dogpoop out of anything AMDoa has produced. Even if they just went with a GTX 1050Ti, it will crush anything but the highest-end AMD part. And it's cheap.

God know's what 'cheap' means though when you're operating on the sort of volume they are. I will be pleasantly surprised if they jump back to team green, but i'm not holding my breath.

I think my point is/was that there's no divider in nVidia's lineup now. Their entire lineup up to the GTX 1070 can fit in laptop thermal envelopes with no issue, so could easily fit in the iMac, and they crush the dogpoop out of anything AMDoa has produced. Even if they just went with a GTX 1050Ti, it will crush anything but the highest-end AMD part. And it's cheap.

Wow. Talk about an extremely biased anti-AMD opinion.

All of AMD's Polaris GPU's are performing exactly where they should be, given their price points. The 1050 Ti 'crushes' the RX 460 (It is also quite a bit more expensive than the 460), but it loses by about 30% compared to the 470, and obviously more compared to the 480/580. The 480 and 1060 perform around even these days, and the 580 performs around 5% faster than the 1060. All of the current AMD GPU's compete very well with their Nvidia counterpart. Calling them dogpopsnizzle is just completely false and misleading.

The 480 vs 1060 debate essentially just comes down to which card you can find the better sale on.

All of AMD's Polaris GPU's are performing exactly where they should be, given their price points. The 1050 Ti 'crushes' the RX 460 (It is also quite a bit more expensive than the 460), but it loses by about 30% compared to the 470, and obviously more compared to the 480/580. The 480 and 1060 perform around even these days, and the 580 performs around 5% faster than the 1060. All of the current AMD GPU's compete very well with their Nvidia counterpart. Calling them dogpopsnizzle is just completely false and misleading.

All of this would be meaningful if we were talking about building a PC..... (Where i i usually recommend the RX 480 as the best performer in the 1080p range for price/peformance)

which we aren't. We're talking about the iMac which has, for years, used laptop parts for thermal reasons. AMD HAS no worthwhile products in the laptop space. None. Zero. Zilch. Nada.

They have underperforming junk.

Quote

The 480 vs 1060 debate essentially just comes down to which card you can find the better sale on.

Again, if we were talking building a PC where thermal performance and power consumption were not an issue, sure. I actually wouldn't recommend the 1060 at current prices for pretty much any reason - its too expensive for not enough extra performance (and its actually still handily beating the RX 480 by about 10% average across most triple-A titles, but you can BIOS flash a 480 into a 580, so well see how it performs there).

But we're talking about an iMac, where the fact that the RX series desktop parts run 15 degrees warmer on average and are not suited for a crammed AIO situation, but nVidias parts ARE, there's absolutely no contest.

Theyre picking up the name AMDead in the GPU space because they aren't competitive right now. They are merely equal. The release of the 500-series cards (just rebranded 400 series cards with slight factory overclocks) and their lower price points may change that, but right now....

Nope.

And they have literally NOTHING competitive in the high end, at all.

They need to step up, and it doesn't look like Vega is even going to make it to market this year.....

But Volta will.

macdude22, on 24 April 2017 - 02:09 PM, said:

On windows I'd rather use a SiS 630 than let that turdnugget Nvidia Experience ever get installed.

which we aren't. We're talking about the iMac which has, for years, used laptop parts for thermal reasons. AMD HAS no worthwhile products in the laptop space. None. Zero. Zilch. Nada.

They have underperforming junk.

I would be more willing to accept your post as a 'facts based opinion' if you didn't mix factual statements with exaggerated opinion statements.

Yes, the iMac has been using mobile GPU's for years now, and yes, Nvidia has the better mobile options at the moment. However, Nvidia having the better options doesn't make AMD's options 'worthless junk'. The RX470 has a laptop version which is essentially identical to its desktop version. It is a 120W GPU (same as the 1060) but is obviously cheaper and performs a bit worse than the 1060. It outperforms the current M395X by a decent margin.

You also seem to mostly be arguing against AMD's current mobile options, while ignoring the fact that the iMac has shipped with a custom/new AMD GPU for years now. The M295X didn't exist before it was available in the iMac. The M395X didn't exist before it was available in the iMac. This fall's iMac Pro I would expect to follow the same path (Vega comes out in like 2 months btw, they've been saying 1H 2017 for a long time now).

If you only look at AMD's current mobile offering (which are essentially non-existant) then you argument stands, but if you look at Apple and AMD's relationship for every Mac with a discrete AMD GPU for the past several years, you will see that nearly every single one has shipped with a custom AMD chip that was never seen before it was shipped in the Mac. The 460 Pro for example in the 2016 MBP is a 35W TDP GPU that has one of the highest performance per watt's ever seen out of a mobile GPU.

Tetsuya, on 24 April 2017 - 02:42 PM, said:

Again, if we were talking building a PC where thermal performance and power consumption were not an issue, sure. I actually wouldn't recommend the 1060 at current prices for pretty much any reason - its too expensive for not enough extra performance (and its actually still handily beating the RX 480 by about 10% average across most triple-A titles, but you can BIOS flash a 480 into a 580, so well see how it performs there).

The 580 fixes the power delivery issues and OC's the 480, so it should perform around 5-10% faster then the 480, or around 2-7% faster then the 1060.

Tetsuya, on 24 April 2017 - 02:42 PM, said:

But we're talking about an iMac, where the fact that the RX series desktop parts run 15 degrees warmer on average and are not suited for a crammed AIO situation, but nVidias parts ARE, there's absolutely no contest.

Theyre picking up the name AMDead in the GPU space because they aren't competitive right now. They are merely equal. The release of the 500-series cards (just rebranded 400 series cards with slight factory overclocks) and their lower price points may change that, but right now....

Nope.

Here you are calling AMD equal, whereas in other places you are calling them junk. Which is it?

Both AMD and Nvidia made massive performance per watt jumps over their previous cards, so we should be seeing a much superior card to the M395X, regardless of which vendor Apple goes with. Again, I am not disagreeing that Nvidia has the efficiency crown, I am disagreeing with your assertion that AMD's Polaris cards are 'worthless junk'.

Tetsuya, on 24 April 2017 - 02:42 PM, said:

And they have literally NOTHING competitive in the high end, at all.

Of course, they don't. They haven't released a card in that sector of the market. They literally are not competing in the high-end market at this time.

As I have stated mutltiple times in this thread and others, the GTX 1070, 1080 and/or 1080 Ti would be amazing in the iMac. Vega will definitely be released by the time the iMac Pro is being sold, and as such, I think it is a very safe bet that there be an AMD competitor for some of the high-end Nvidia cards.

Tetsuya, on 24 April 2017 - 02:42 PM, said:

They need to step up, and it doesn't look like Vega is even going to make it to market this year.....

But Volta will.

Pretty much every tech news source is expecting Vega in a month or two, as that is the release date that AMD has given. Volta will not be out until H1 2018 at the earliest unless Vega somehow crushes Pascal (which I am not expecting it to at all).

I would be more willing to accept your post as a 'facts based opinion' if you didn't mix factual statements with exaggerated opinion statements.

Yes, the iMac has been using mobile GPU's for years now, and yes, Nvidia has the better mobile options at the moment. However, Nvidia having the better options doesn't make AMD's options 'worthless junk'. The RX470 has a laptop version which is essentially identical to its desktop version. It is a 120W GPU (same as the 1060) but is obviously cheaper and performs a bit worse than the 1060. It outperforms the current M395X by a decent margin.

And yet i cant find a single product actually shipping with said theoretical GPU, and certainly not in the mobile space. Its a paper product. No one wants to use it because of the excess heat it produces.

Quote

You also seem to mostly be arguing against AMD's current mobile options, while ignoring the fact that the iMac has shipped with a custom/new AMD GPU for years now. The M295X didn't exist before it was available in the iMac. The M395X didn't exist before it was available in the iMac. This fall's iMac Pro I would expect to follow the same path (Vega comes out in like 2 months btw, they've been saying 1H 2017 for a long time now).

Those "custom" GPUs are nothing of the sort. Theyre just overclocked existing parts. There's no new silicon there. And they perform fairly awfully for how much Apple charges for them.

Quote

If you only look at AMD's current mobile offering (which are essentially non-existant) then you argument stands, but if you look at Apple and AMD's relationship for every Mac with a discrete AMD GPU for the past several years, you will see that nearly every single one has shipped with a custom AMD chip that was never seen before it was shipped in the Mac. The 460 Pro for example in the 2016 MBP is a 35W TDP GPU that has one of the highest performance per watt's ever seen out of a mobile GPU.

And is just the "Apple" name for the (not named at the time) Polaris GPU they showed off last year at GDC playing SW: Battlefront (poorly). Right down to the performance per watt.

The 580 fixes the power delivery issues and OC's the 480, so it should perform around 5-10% faster then the 480, or around 2-7% faster then the 1060.

.... how exactly does it fix the power delivery issues? It's the exact same silicon. You can even BIOS flash the 480 into a 580. And dear god.. TechPowerFail. Could we link to like.. a reliable benchmark site please?

Quote

Here you are calling AMD equal, whereas in other places you are calling them junk. Which is it?

I seriously wanted to include the Picard ascii facepalm here.

The mobile space. and the desktop space. Are. Two. Different. Things.

It isn't a tough concept. On the desktop, where power draw and thermals are not an issue, AMD is selling the 470/480 cheaply enough (and soon/nowish the 570 and 580 even a little cheaper) that it is easily the best performance per dollar for 1080p.

In the mobile space, they literally have no product worth buying. And the mobile space is what you're going to have to look to for the iMac because of Apple's insistence on ever-slimmer, ever-more-heat-constrained designs.

Quote

Both AMD and Nvidia made massive performance per watt jumps over their previous cards, so we should be seeing a much superior card to the M395X, regardless of which vendor Apple goes with. Again, I am not disagreeing that Nvidia has the efficiency crown, I am disagreeing with your assertion that AMD's Polaris cards are 'worthless junk'.

you left off the "in the mobile space." At no point did i say they were worthless junk in the desktop space. Not once.

Quote

Pretty much every tech news source is expecting Vega in a month or two, as that is the release date that AMD has given.

By "every tech news source" we're not talking about Anandtech, Tom's, LTT, Paul's Hardware, etc, then.. because they've all commented within the last few weeks that Vega is being delayed (again)... and that nVidia is moving up Volta's launch to October or so of this year. As well as sources from the actual chip fabs themselves confirming that Vega isn't meeting production needs and is probably getting pushed back to early Q4 2017.

If Volta's production units are anywhere near as good as the engineering samples that have already been seen in the wild (which WAS the case for Pascal), Vega is going to have to be the second coming or it is going to be DOA. The GV106 engineering sample (which would make it a GTX 2060 or 2050, depending on what parts nVidia intends to use for which segments) is putting out performance like a GTX 1080. A full-fat GV100 or slightly cut GV102 (Titan Xv & Quadro cards for GV100 and 2080 for GV102) is going to be absolutely insane.

Hot damn, nerd fight! OK guys, no punching below the belt unless it is hysterical in context. No gouging, you'll sprain your spacebar thumb and absolutely NO open hand slapping is allowed (With the exception of DirtyHarry). No calculators, Rick Rolls, or Googling. If you use a meme it can be used in evidence against you in a court of law. You have the right to call a nerd friend but you must not word for word quote him unless frak it, you do. Response time is critical, if you start to lag you are flailing, and therefore perceived as getting your sorry ass handed to you, so just rage full-bore techno babble for a page then point at a shiny. It couldn't hurt, worst case scenario is that you have to claim your account was hacked but meantime you are still keeping your lag time down. Remember to keep your thumbs out of the way when you slam the bricks together. Imaginary friends, by law, may not testify.

I typed individuals responses to everything you said Tetsuya, but then deleted it. I feel like we are agreeing on 95% here, and disagreeing on 5%. We seem to follow all of the same tech sources (Pauls HW, BitWit, Jayz2C, HWC, r/nvidia, r/amd/, r/hardware, r/pcgaming are my main news sources). As a side note, Alienware is shipping the RX 470 in some of their laptops, and Dell is shipping in the RX 460 in some of their budget gaming laptops. They aren't 'theoretical GPUs' - you can order a laptop with one right now.

Here is what I am saying in a few bullet points:

Polaris isn't popsnizzle, it just isn't as good as Pascal

Apple probably has a Vega GPU as an option for the iMac Pro, assuming they are staying with AMD. I believe this based off of every top end iMac going back a long ways featured the absolute top-end GPU from either AMD or Nvidia. Apple didn't always have the best GPU in the iMac, but they always had the best mobile GPU that one of the manufacturers could offer. (example: 6970M, 680MX, 780M, M295X, M395X). I do not expect them to break that trend, especially given their new pro focus.

It seems to me that your main argument is that Polaris isn't as good as Nvidia on mobile (due to less performance per watt, higher TDP, etc.), therefore it is junk on mobile. I only disagree with the 'junk' part of that statement. I agree with everything else.

I don't think that slightly lower performance per watt and/or total performance makes something terrible. If that were the case, then a quad core i7/Xeon would be a 'terrible choice' versus a similarly priced Ryzen CPU when it came to productivity tasks.Obviously, the 4C/8T Xeon/i7 aren't terrible choices.

Hot damn, nerd fight! OK guys, no punching below the belt unless it is hysterical in context. No gouging, you'll sprain your spacebar thumb and absolutely NO open hand slapping is allowed (With the exception of DirtyHarry). No calculators, Rick Rolls, or Googling. If you use a meme it can be used in evidence against you in a court of law. You have the right to call a nerd friend but you must not word for word quote him unless frak it, you do. Response time is critical, if you start to lag you are flailing, and therefore perceived as getting your sorry ass handed to you, so just rage full-bore techno babble for a page then point at a shiny. It couldn't hurt, worst case scenario is that you have to claim your account was hacked but meantime you are still keeping your lag time down. Remember to keep your thumbs out of the way when you slam the bricks together. Imaginary friends, by law, may not testify.

Remaining space left blank intentionally.

I feel like I stopped the debate with this joke, if so I apologize. Nerd fights are fountains of information. It's a good thing.

Neither one of us can really be proven correct. We simply disagree on how effective Polaris can be as a mobile GPU; and other things like Vega mobile GPUs, Volta, and what GPU the iMac Pro will offer won't be confirmed until much later this year.

Iris fanbois like you should be taken out back and shot. Software generated graphics is the future, this time they will get it right! Visual Basic has come a LONG way in the last couple of decades but you circuit board junkies and your integrated circuits can't let go. I blame the greedy electronics industry for this. They can't sell you a software patch but they sure as hell can sell you a fancy dancy so called GPU hardware update. They don't care about you, all they care about is your money.

Hot damn, nerd fight! OK guys, no punching below the belt unless it is hysterical in context. No gouging, you'll sprain your spacebar thumb and absolutely NO open hand slapping is allowed (With the exception of DirtyHarry). No calculators, Rick Rolls, or Googling. If you use a meme it can be used in evidence against you in a court of law. You have the right to call a nerd friend but you must not word for word quote him unless frak it, you do. Response time is critical, if you start to lag you are flailing, and therefore perceived as getting your sorry ass handed to you, so just rage full-bore techno babble for a page then point at a shiny. It couldn't hurt, worst case scenario is that you have to claim your account was hacked but meantime you are still keeping your lag time down. Remember to keep your thumbs out of the way when you slam the bricks together. Imaginary friends, by law, may not testify.